Debian Weekly News - April 3rd, 2002

Welcome to this year's fourteenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Since Monday was April 1st, here's Debian's this
year's April fools prank, which
was a lot funnier than last year's joke. By the way, here are the pranks from
linux-kernel, Slashdot and Dutch Qt bigots. CPAN announced their shift towards Java and freshmeat.net turned green/white on black.

Debian's Problems, Debian's Future. Eduard Bloch sent a report
listing some of Debian's problems. Eduard believes that it is time to point
out some bad trends in Debian, which have to be terminated, or otherwise the
whole system is going to collapse, sooner or later. Some people have agreed
to postpone such discussions after the Woody release, though.

Debian Apache 2.0.34. Thom May announced
the availability of Debian packages for Apache 2.0.32, which are already
superseded by packages for version 2.0.34. Since this is Apache2 they are
not yet included in the Debian archive. You are, however, free to fetch
packages from Thom's web
page. Please don't use the Bug Tracking
System but send comments to debian-apache@lists.debian.org
instead.

LDAP Backend for Debconf. Matthew Palmer made an initial
release of debconf-ldap, an LDAP backend for debconf. It allows you to
store cluster-wide configuration in a central repository, and even store
machine-specific configuration in a separate repository. You can download
Matthew's packages from here.
He's looking for comments, please send them to mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au.

Debian Jr. Quick Guide. Derek Neighbors and Ben Armstrong
wrote the Debian Jr. Quick Guide which aims at those who would like to guide
children using Debian Jr., particularly those who are new to it and are
planning to install it. Parts of the document are useful for the system
administrator as well. Please send comments to Ben Armstrong.

Academic Papers in Debian. C.M. Connelly did some research on
packages containing academic papers as part of their documentation. Her
feeling is that the historical and frozen documents describing some early state
or underlayment of the software, and not day-to-day documentation, shouldn't be
worried about. She raises the question if the inclusion in the source package
is sufficient to assume that its distribution is legal under the terms of the
copyright of the entire package.

Debian to Join OASIS. Mark Johnson initiated
an effort for the Debian Project to join OASIS (Organization for the Advancement
of Structured Information Standards). Quickly he was able to raise enough funds to
make Debian join the group as the first GNU/Linux distribution. OASIS is an
international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications
based on public standards such as XML, SGML
and DocBook, which are
integrable parts of the Debian SGML
infrastructure.

Dropping non-free SSH. Aaron Ucko believes that
there is no good reason anymore to keep ssh-nonfree around. For a while the
advantage over OpenSSH was support for Kerberos, which is already included in
OpenSSH as well. Since nobody objected, Aaron later released a transition
proposal to implement a smooth transition for our users.

teTeX License Survey. C.M. Connelly has been checking
the licenses of about three hundred documentation files included with Debian's
teTeX packages to verify that these files may be distributed with Debian. She
found that about thirty
files either cannot be distributed at all or are not free. In many cases, the
documentation files did not contain specific licensing information, so the
licensing information for the entire package or font distribution applies to
the documentation as well. Upstream was informed so these issues may be
resolved sooner or later.

Update on the Project Leader Election. It is amusing that
the voting system is rewritten during the vote, but things seem to work out
well. Manoj Srivastava reports that
the scripts that are required to process the vote are mostly done, and that automated acks
and naks are sent out. He also released a statement
that covers accountability of the secret ballot. Each voter will receive a
secret token, which was introduced
by Anthony Towns. With this method the secret ballot can be verified from
public ballot results. Here are stats.

Compiler Cache for Buildds? Paul Russell wondered if
it would be a good idea to install Andrew Tridgell's Compiler Cache on the
buildd machines. In theory this sounds like a good idea, however the cache
would have to be several Gigabytes large, since there are 5,000 source
packages. Even if the binary package is only a few MB's large, glibc source
takes
about 600 MB and XFree86 even takes 1.6 GB. A cache should at least cover
these large and timeconsuming packages, which have to be rebuilt every once in
a while.

New Installer for Debian? The Linux User Magazine from
Germany started an effort to create a new installer for Debian. They believe that the
current installer is the most complicated one among all GNU/Linux
distributions but that the packaging system rocks. Hence, they would like to
create an easy installation system targeting at newbie users. Interested
parties should send feedback and check the new installer which has
been postponed until Woody is released.

New Stable Revision Released. Joey finally released another revision (r6) of Debian
GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename `potato'). This revision adds no less than 23 more
security updates to the stable distribution of Debian, covering packages like
analog, glibc, gnujsp, gzip, listar, mod_ssl, ncurses, php, sudo, uucp and xchat.
A few important corrections were added as well, which cover packages like
dump, man2html, nfs, samba and squid. See the preparation page for details.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have this packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 115 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

Got News? Please inform us about everything that is
happening in the Debian community. We are always looking for any interesting
stories to add, especially new items by volunteer writers, and topics we tend
to miss. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.